Inspirational video: Bringing art and possibility to our thinking about being disabled
Meet Aimee Mullin, a woman with 12 pairs of legs. She presents a thought provoking and beautiful lesson on how we need to change our thinking about being disabled and the disabled. She has incorporated creativity and art into her prosthetic legs in a most amazing way. She brings up the point that adults superimpose rules on children about disabled people, like “now, don’t stare at her legs” which is going to make the children look. Rather, she ingeniously allowed children to enter her presentation she refers to that she did in the past and let them take the lead. They headed right to the table of legs and began exploring them.
As an aside, “child led learning” is what I am learning to do in a speech class that is designed to help my daughter learn to talk. It is the most valuable approach to learning because children learn more when they show you what they are interested in learning.
Aimee Mullin makes a brilliant comparison between herself and Pamela Anderson; she says that Pamela has more prosthetics in her body than she does –yet Pamela isn’t called disabled!
This little break from your everyday reality will refresh you, I promise!
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What’s it like, painting with oil paints?
There is nothing like painting with oil paints…and it is especially wonderful if you have a love of butter and all things rich and creamy. Now, I just heard a few of you protest because you are water-based painters and have issues with fat. Not me! I have a love affair going on with full-fat products and I guess it shows. If oil paints were foods, I’d eat them! Their texture, color, smell and consistency are so enticing and luscious they just beg to be consumed by the sensuous artist.
Road To Alfonsinas Sea of Cortez, oils on canvas
Painting with oil paints is…indescribable until you try it. Oh, I can go on about how smooth and silky the oil paint feels when too much is used and the brush eagerly slips over the canvas texture in a rush only to offer resistance in the end as dry brush meets dry canvas. Or, I can tell you that the visual pleasure it offers, as colors willingly blend into beautiful tints, tones and shades is akin to watching a spectacular sunset evolve. Even the smell of paint is unique with hints of Greek Retsina wine and pressed linseed oil. Read more
How to Buy A Canvas for Oil Painting Your First Oil Painting
“Teacher, what size canvas should I buy for my first oil painting?”
This is the most common question I get from my beginning oil painting students. It always makes me smile. I know they want me to say something ridiculous like “Buy any canvas 16″ x 20″ maximum to 4″ x 6″ minimum.” Beginning oil painting students have a lot of fear about buying a canvas for their first oil painting.
Conch Shell, oils on canvas
“First, do you know what you are going to paint?”
If the answer is “no” you should not go shopping because there is no way you can buy the most perfect canvas for your first (or next) painting. Talk about putting the cart before the horse!
The most important aspect to buying a canvas, for oil painting your first picture, is that you understand that the inner vision of your first oil painting is chemically and energetically imprinted on every cell of your body. There exists in the artist’s body a strange and beautiful dynamic tension –that even the artist is totally unaware of until the painting is completed and signed. The best way I can explain this tension is to perhaps coarsely defined it as ”the inner knowing or knowledge of the finished product, which exists in time and space as a completed painting, that the artist has become aware of at a subconscious level.” What I translate this into and tell every art student is this: Read more
Beginning Oil Painting – The Lesson of the “What Do I Paint?”
My First Oil Painting - Age 11
For more than ten years I taught beginning oil painting in Cupertino, CA in a community center setting that became a sort of open studio for more advanced painters who wanted to escape Silicon Valley and paint in a quiet setting with like minded folk.
The first lesson always begins with a talk about oil painting art supplies. I reveal what is needed and why…I even delve deep into the differences between water color versus oil painting brushes and use diagrams to help people remember the names of certain brushes. There is a good bit of info I share and then we discuss how to select an image to paint. This is the most important lesson of all. The idea behind this is so critical that if you get it wrong, you will never be a successful painter. Read more
A Short Guide to Finding A Creative Writing Idea
People would be astonished at the way my brain works. It’s even beyond describing as “an untypical woman’s brain”. I suspect I use all four quadrants equally; now add in biofeedback, intuition and memory and it truly starts getting interesting. I also have a gift for picking up details when looking at life, which might explain my abilities as a realism painter. Add in a small touch of A.D.D. and perhaps a tad too many unconventional thoughts and what you get is an overwhelming list of ideas and possibilities for exploring, tasting and sampling life. If ever there was a person with too many ideas and not enough time, it’s me.
I’m never stuck for an idea so let me share with you how to get one. Ready? Look to your right, what do you see? Okay, so it’s a white wall. Gee, that sounds boring, only it isn’t. It’s a possible essay on walking through walls and the bones that were once found in a monastery’s walls in south India during renovations; a new entrance to your computer space with a secret latch and wine storage unit; or, a blank canvas waiting for a beautiful and colorful image to appear. Look down to your left. What? It’s just the carpet? Oh, my! It’s a jungle in there if only you put a magnifying glass on it. Write about it for a 5 year old as if you were sitting around a campfire and wanted to scare the heck out of them. Go look out a window…it’s the opening of a short story just describing what it feels like to be inside looking out. And we haven’t even taken a walk outside. Read more
